Ponomar is a contemporary Church Slavonic font that reproduces the typeface used in editions published by the Synodal Press of the Russian Orthodox Church in the early twentieth century. It is presently used in various liturgical books published by the Moscow Patriarchate. It also contains characters needed to typeset liturgical texts in Romanian (Moldovan) Cyrillic, Aleut, and Sakha (Yakut).

The font was originally designed by Vlad Dorosh as Hirmos UCS for the Irmologion project. It was then released under the LaTeX Project Public License as part of CSLTeX. Next, it was reencoded for Unicode by Aleksandr Andreev and Nikita Simmons and released as Hirmos Ponomar. Finally, additional glyphs and OT features were added and the font was released as Ponomar Unicode, as part of the Slavonic Computing Initiative, and under SIL OFL v. 1.1. Edited by Aleksandr Andreev for Google Fonts.

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is available with a FAQ at https://openfontlicense.org/.

The font source is stored in a FontForge SFD file in the sources/ directory. All modifications should be made in FontForge, resulting in an updated SFD file. This file is then converted to UFO format by running the convert script. From terminal:

cd your/local/project/directory
./convert.sh

The font can then be built using fontmake and gftools by running:

make build

Note that this requires Python and will install all of the necessary libraries and tools into a virtualenv at venv/.

To delete the virtualenv and the results of the build, run:

make clean

To build the sample image the sits at the top of this README, run:

make images

The commands make update and make update-project-template update the repository structure and Python dependencies and should be run periodically.

Google's master repository also had a GitHub workflow for building the fonts in the cloud on push, but this seems to always fail because of incorrect dependencies, so has been disabled. Instead, built binaries are stored on GitHub in the fonts/ directory.

This font has been added to Google Fonts and is available for use in Google Docs and other cloud-based software.

• Stylistic Set 1 (ss01) changes the hyphen symbol (-) to an underscore (_), which is the default hyphenation symbol used in Synodal Church Slavonic. This can be used for software such as LibreOffice that does not support changing the default hyphenation character.

• Stylistic Set 2 (ss02) provides blackletter forms of Latin characters and ASCII digits. This is useful for setting text in English or other Western languages side-by-side with Slavonic in some contexts.

• Stylistic Alternatives (salt) are provided for the following characters:

  • an alternative form of capital wide yest (U+0404), used mostly for typesetting Ukrainian text stylized as Church Slavonic.
  • an alternative form of capital u (U+0423), that looks exactly like U+A64A (this is a feature of some publications)
  • an analagous alternative form of capital u with breve (U+040E)
  • eight alternative forms of the Symbol for Mark's Chapter (U+1F545)

• Three ligatures are available by inserting U+200D Zero Width Joiner:

  • Ligature A-U (U+0430 U+200D U+0443)
  • Ligature El-U (U+043B U+200D U+0443)
  • Ligature Te-Ve (U+0442 U+200D U+0432)

See your software's documentation about how to access these glyphs.

As well, a number of glyphs are available in the Private Use Area. The most relevant of these are duplicates of the Typicon symbols U+1F540 through U+1F545 available at U+F400 through U+F405. This is useful in some applications that do not support the Unicode SMP.

See the main repository and the website.